I Haz a BIG Sad…

So I’m sick again today, and I’m sitting here, watching Oprah. I get to the end of a stripe in my brown ripple afghan. Yay! I put the blanket down to take a break, on the couch next to me, and then I cross the room to check my e-mail.

I then hear this ungodly rrrrrrr-r-r-r-i-i-pppp! My blankie, my beautiful (albeit brown) blankie, is hooked on the footrest mount of my chair. And I’m dragging it with me. When I manage to extricate it from myself, I saw this:

If there were some word I could type that would mimic the sound of my wails, I would. But I think the sound defies written expression. I’ve been working on this blanket for almost 6 months. I was getting near a point where I was going to call it done, and now this.

The thing is, I don’t know how to repair it. It is ripped in the middle of the second stripe. I don’t know if there even is a way to fix it. It’s a little beyond me. I could stick a lifeline in the third stripe, then go back and add yarn and do a bind off row there. But that would disturb the color pattern. The second stripe is not just pulled out, it is actually ripped. And I can’t just pick up and knit in the opposite direction, because it’s a ripple pattern and the ripples all already go the other way.

I know there must be an expert knitter out there who would have some ideas. If so, I’d love to hear them!

Thanks! Back to sobbing now.

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Comments

Trish. What you do: you snip just a tiny snip at the side of the row below that one, then carefully undo, being glad it’s so close to the edge. When you’re frogging backwards, you’ll find you have to pull the whole expanse of yarn through the last stitch on the end of each row. That’s okay. What you’ll do is frog back to the row of or just past the ripped one, carefully tinking back onto the needle at the last, then use the still-attached yarn to cast off where the disaster happened. If that’s too much of a hassle, break it and then splice in a new strand at the beginning of that casting-off row. I’m so glad it was near the end!

My hearfelt sympathies on your accident. You have probably had several responses, including the following and better.

I would estalish a lifeline at the first whole plain knitted row.
Carefully remove all previous rows.
Cast on a new row in the original cas-on yarn and knit new replacement rows.
Kitchener the new section with the following section.

Take a deep breath and think it through. I’m sure all your hard work will not go to waste.

Trish,
First, thread a piece of scrap yarn through any loops you can find. Do this for both sides, each on its own piece of yarn. Then, you can repair it with a kitchener.
But also take this as a sign – you and this blanket just aren’t a good combination right now! Go back to your socks! (That heel looks fantastic!). Maybe the blanket will behave better next week!
If you want, I’ll repair it for you – I know it might be expensive to send it up here to NJ, but I’d be glad to take on the challenge of the repair.

What a heartbreaking thing to happen after months of work. I’d suggest taking the problem to the helpful people on ravelry. My only way of working it out would be to try to graft the rows together using knitty’s tuturial. But that would also add an extra row. Hope you can get a good fix for your blanket.

Trish, I’ll go with Arlene – try to kitchener or graft the stitches together. It used to be called “darning.” You might have to work a few extra stitches here and there, but you should be able to accomplish it with patience and some extra yarn. Hope it works! If I get a trip to the DC area soon (I hate life being so much in flux!) we can meet and I’ll help you through it. I’ve done repairs on older afghans that I’ve inherited.

For now: Get some lifelines in place, use safety pins or stitchholders or whatever you have, even a couple spare needles or cables, to hold the stitches and prevent the afghan from unraveling. If it does that, it will be a real mess!

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